Murder at Roissy

This was my last fiction book. Where The Torquemada Killer had been a police procedural, I’d long loved the English Locked-Room mysteries so I decided I’d model this book on that.

There is a BDSM resort in Upstate New York that I choose as my model, but I ripped it out of that rather cold and wooded state to plunk it into Arizona. I wouldn’t have chosen to use that state today, but this was a bit saner era. Besides who could pass up the image of the Arizona Sheriff of that era.

When she had first met Sheriff John Clarke, Flame had thought he was a perfect Arizona lawman. This meant he was a bit more Texan than any Texan had the nerve to be. In casual conversation, he had admitted to her that from the time his father put a toy six-gun in the crib with him, he had wanted to be a sheriff, riding the range and putting the fear of god into the bad guys. She knew that in most cases like this, nature, the ultimate practical joker, surrounds such a noble soul with a body more suitable for an accountant than a cowboy. This time, however, nature got it right.

Six feet six and hefty, “My weight is a matter of discussion only between me and my scale,” he had told her, Sheriff John Clarke could have stepped with his wide brimmed hat and snake-skin boots into any of a thousand oat-burner Westerns. In the five years, she had lived in the country she had seen this facade fool some people into thinking he was dumb. however, all too often, they weren’t disabused of this misconception until they heard him reciting, slowly and carefully, “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right …

I began writing it after I self-published Safe, Sane, Consensual and Fun with the intention of almost making it a self-published book, to keep it away from Masquerade. However, the difficulties of self publishing convinced me to drop the project.

About a year later, I got a note from Janet Hardy at Greenery Press telling me that they were starting a fiction line, called Grass Stain Press and would I be willing to write the flagship book. I had Murder at Roissy about half way finished and I put every spare minute into finishing it.

As with The Torquemada Killer, I drew on my Scene experience and not a few Scene friends to populate the remote, but upscale resort.

It was a modest success and even spawned a Japanese edition, but all too soon, the Internet undercut the book business, hitting the fiction market particularly hard and Grass Stain Press went out of business taking Murder at Roissy with it.

Again, the wonderful folks at Xcite Books came through and gave Murder at Roissy a new taste of digital life.